Hiring + Retention
The Secret to Scaling Sales Team Revenue: Your Managers
What’s the most overlooked factor in sales growth? Your frontline sales managers.
They influence every deal, every rep, every forecast, and yet about 60% of new managers report they never received training when they stepped into leadership.
Let’s stop looking past the obvious. Your frontline managers are the secret to scaling sales growth.
If you want more reps hitting quota, more deals converting, stronger forecasts, and less burnout across the board, it starts with your managers. Not your tech stack. Not your latest AI tool. Not another rep enablement platform (though these are important and we love them, check out our friends at Allego).
I’ve worked with thousands of sales teams and here’s the hard truth. Most companies are investing in everything except the role that has the biggest impact on team performance and revenue growth.
And when we flip that, the results are massive. We’re talking 20 to 47% increases in rep conversion rates. And we didn’t even touch the rep. Just by developing their manager.
So if you’re planning for growth, keep reading. Because managers aren’t a bottleneck. They’re your biggest growth engine.
1. Managers Bring Consistency (and That’s What Scales)
Change is part of growth. Reps switch teams. Territories shift. Comp plans evolve. But in the middle of it all, your frontline managers keep the team focused, engaged, and aligned.
That only works when they’re supported.
Too often, every manager ends up running their own playbook. Not because they want to, but because they’ve never been shown what “good” looks like. And even when you have playbooks, they don’t get translated into everyday actions and team rhythms.
Here’s where the cracks usually show up:
- Hiring: Everyone’s looking for different things. Even with a profile in place, managers need support identifying what good sounds like in an interview.
- Performance management: Breaking down a big quota into measurable KPIs isn’t intuitive. And very few new managers have been trained to do it.
- Rep engagement: Some managers meet weekly. Some meet monthly. Some skip 1:1s entirely. Most spend time reviewing pipeline, not developing skills or coaching.
- Pipeline hygiene: Definitions for deal stages vary across teams. That makes forecasts unreliable and coaching hard to scale.
Consistency is what turns momentum into real, scalable growth. And it starts at the manager level.
Give them the tools to:
- Hire with confidence using a shared rubric
- Set goals and track KPIs that actually drive performance
- Run a standard meeting cadence that blends coaching, performance, and career conversations
- Clean up pipeline processes so everyone’s speaking the same language
Even tenured managers benefit from this kind of clarity. One enterprise team we worked with had over 10 years of management experience and still walked away from this training saying, “I wish I’d had this years ago.”
2. Great Managers Build People, Not Just Pipelines
Most sales managers were promoted from rep roles. And as reps, their entire world revolved around winning. So when things get tough, what do they fall back on?
Closing the deal.
They hop on the call. They take over the demo. They second-voice the close. It’s not bad intentions, they’re just doing what worked for them. But when a manager becomes the deal hero, the team stops learning.
And that’s when reps leave.
- They leave when they don’t feel developed
- They leave when they’re not hitting quota
- They leave when they don’t have a strong relationship with their manager
The revolving door hurts growth. Every open seat is lost pipeline. Every green rep takes months to ramp. Every exit chips away at morale.
What helps? Redefining the manager role and giving your leaders a new toolkit.
- Help them shift from deal-doer to rep-developer
- Give them interaction frameworks like COACHN so coaching doesn’t feel like guesswork
- Recognize managers for building people, not just saving quarters
Because a manager who builds skill, confidence, and trust is someone who retains reps, not replaces them.
READ: Build Your Sales Manager Cadence (& Save Time and Stress)
3. Coaching Is a Skill, and It Can Be Learned
We all love to say coaching is the silver bullet. And it is. But only when it’s done well.
Real coaching moves the needle on performance, confidence, and retention. But too often, what we call “coaching” is just a pipeline review in disguise.
If you’ve ever listened in and heard:
- The manager doing all the talking
- A rep leaving with three disjointed to-dos
- A session that feels more like a performance review than a development convo
Then chances are, your managers need support here.
The most common trap? The Mini-me. That’s the manager who coaches every rep to be a version of themselves. It works for the one or two reps with the same style. Everyone else gets frustrated, disengaged, or overlooked.
Good coaching is consistent, rep-centered, and rooted in skill development, not deal rescue.
That’s why we don’t treat coaching like a one-hour workshop. It’s now a six-hour, three-part course here at Factor 8. Because shifting behavior and building confidence takes time. And when it clicks, reps perform. They stay. And they grow.
READ: The Best Sales Coaching Questions Ever
If You’re Skipping Manager Development, You’re Skipping the Scale
Let’s be honest. The biggest miss isn’t the manager. It’s us.
We’ve skipped the basics. We assume managers will figure it out because we did. We prioritize tech over training. We fix people problems with process or platform investments.
But if you want more reps to hit quota, you don’t need a new tool (yet). You need stronger conversations first.
That comes from skilled, supported, confident managers.
Most reps today get a sliver of what they need in onboarding. Then they’re tossed five tools and a quota. They’re still learning the basics. And the person who owns the rest?
Their manager.
So let’s invest in them. Train them. Coach them. Give them a framework, a cadence, and a community. Make development part of the rhythm, not a one-time event.
Because your reps aren’t going to grow if your managers aren’t growing too.
Managers are the secret to scalable revenue growth. Let’s stop hoping they figure it out, and start helping them knock it out of the park.
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Building a Top-Performing Sales Team [Webinar Recording]
Building a Top-Performing Sales Team
[Video Recording]
Meet the Speakers
Lauren Bailey
Founder
Factor 8 & #GirlsClub
Lauren Bailey, known to many as “LB”, is a sales leader, enablement leader, and entrepreneur and founder of 3 successful brands: Factor 8, providing front-line job training for inside sellers and managers, The Sales Bar, a subscription-based virtual sales training platform, and #GirlsClub, a community and development program helping more women earn leadership positions in sales.
Her mission is to change lives by supercharging people’s careers and helping them love coming to work. When we feel confident and successful at work, everything is better, right? Known on the speaker circuit for her “No B.S.” style and spunk, look for LB to make you laugh, keep things moving quickly, and help you take immediate action with her tactical tips and insights.
Devyn Blume
Sr. Account Executive
Allego
Devyn is a Sr. Account Executive at Allego with 8 years of experience in sales, specializing in consultative selling and client relationship management. Throughout her career she has excelled in driving revenue growth, building strong customer partnerships, and leveraging sales technologies to streamline processes.
At Allego, Devyn focuses on delivering innovative sales enablement solutions, helping teams optimize training, onboarding, and content sharing. With expertise spanning multiple industries, she is a trusted advisor to clients seeking to enhance sales performance through technology-driven solutions.
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Sales Manager Fears, Fails, and Fixes: Fast Actions to Prevent Burnout & Failure! [Webinar Recording]
Sales Manager Fears, Fails, and Fixes: Fast Actions to Prevent Burnout & Failure!
[Video Recording]
How to Hire and Retain Top Sales Reps and Managers
Help! I’m hiring salespeople, but where do I find them? Well, probably not in the stack of resumes from your recruiting department. Or maybe you already know that and hence the Google search bringing you here. Great sales talent is near impossible to find these days and will continue to be difficult in the coming years thanks to shifting employment rates, aging demographics, and increases in sales hiring. Your ideal candidate profile with a few years of experience in your industry and a college degree isn’t coming to you. So, what do you do?
Here are a few creative strategies and tactics to consider when hiring salespeople:
Get Ready to Win
It’s a seller’s market, not an employer’s market so every candidate you do happen to find will be comparing you to other potential offers. You are competing with other companies, so make sure now that your…
- Website reflects a great culture
- Glassdoor reviews are positive
- Employees and customers have posted good things
- Website reflects diversity (they won’t apply if they don’t see it)
- Your process moves 2x faster than it used to. If it takes you 4 weeks to hire, they’ll accept elsewhere
- Social presence is engaging, recent, and active
- Pay and benefits are at, or above, market rate
- Company social causes exist and are enticing
- Job descriptions aren’t wish lists. Keep them short to fill the funnel (key for females)
- Career growth and development opportunities are plentiful
More than ever, employees are shopping employers and the new generations care less about pay and more about career growth, development opportunities, and social causes. Ask yourself: How would they look to their followers if they joined your company? Will their friends think they went back to the dark ages? Or will they have FOMO because the company is totally GOAT?
(If you don’t know what either of these terms mean, it’s OK, I had to look up one of them too. But maybe get a 20-something in recruiting to do the social checks for you 😉)
Get More Candidates
OK, got this all delegated and you’re ready to win the battle? Now it’s time to fill the pipeline. Like any smart sales leader, you know better than to have just one source. Here are some great actions to try this year:
- Repurpose a sales headcount to shop LinkedIn for passive candidates
- Start a program at local colleges BEFORE they graduate or go to career fairs
- Partner with sales colleges to volunteer to speak or judge role plays
- Grant a massive bonus for referrals
- Comp (or measure) managers for finding their own talent
- Go talk to employees in service, marketing, product, delivery who might try sales
- Try community college or tech school career fairs (is a 4-year degree totally necessary?)
- Use social networks to post (e.g. is there a local mom’s group?)
- Try advertising a contest, scholarship, or other promotion for sellers/leaders and use it as a marketing funnel (it’s a lead list! Call it!)
- Find your favorite person each week (Restaurant server? Your kid’s teacher?) and recruit
If these seem like desperate measures, then I’ve hit the mark. This is not a time for passive recruiting. Anyone great at selling who isn’t employed already is probably not your hire.
Improve Your Selection
Got folks in the funnel but need help choosing a better fit?
Listen, I made some HORRIBLE hiring decisions my first year in every new position. Bet you have too. It’s critical to remember that your hiring process needs to be a documented and rigorous pipeline just like your sales funnel. Here are a few questions to help:
- Is the screening aligned to the job (e.g. phone screens for phone sales?)
- Do you have defined gates to pass to the next stage?
- Are you involving multiple decision-makers?
- Are you looking for experience and skill? Or behavior and aptitude (pick the latter)?
- Who’s doing the heaviest lifting and how can you put less on your managers?
- Do candidates have a great idea of what to expect? Could a job shadow help?
- Are your managers aligned on the definition of a good candidate?
- Can managers hire their own teams (trust me, don’t do it for them)
- Do your screening tools help you increase the pool vs. decrease (your resume screener or profile tool may be weeding out today’s definition of good)
- Have you trained managers on how to interview?
I know, overwhelming – especially with your rag-tag group of new and tenured managers (just guessing). I got your back on this one with our new Sales Bar eLearning course, “Hire Like a Rockstar”, that will help your entire team define good, create a rubric of criteria, and align interview questions + scoring to make consistently better hires. You’re welcome. 🙂
![SALES TEAM RETENTION [INFOGRAPHIC]](https://no-cache.hubspot.com/cta/default/3471041/919bf4d3-fb8e-4f9a-b406-209898c4dd34.png){kind=small}
Keep the Talent You Find
Finally, we can’t address keeping your sales team afloat if there’s a hole in the boat. The best way to staff your team is to keep the ones you have. Remember, you make your number every month on the backs of your B players. Work like hell to keep your A, B, and C players coming to work and grow. Here’s what’s most important in this fight:
- Monthly sales training opportunities. That’s right, several hours a month is table stakes, and a pass to LinkedIn learning isn’t impressive anymore
- Monthly call coaching. Yes, monthly. Make sure your managers are trained on how to do call coaching well and are doing it consistently
- A documented career path with clarity on how and when they’ll move up
- Opportunities to move up within 18 months (average lifespan of a new rep)
- Access to leaders. Manager meetings, skip levels, feeling close to executives
- Company social causes. Volunteering together or a pet charity with hands-on opportunities
- Work/life balance. Kids these days (did I just type that?) are uber-focused on having a full life, less stress, and chances to be with family and friends
- Basic tech stack. They’re used to a great CRM, engagement tool, call recording, data sources, and more. If you’re using Excel spreadsheets, you’d better rock the rest of this list
- A mission to believe in. Listen, even if you sell floor wax, be sure every employee knows how they’re helping change the world
- A mentor and/or buddy. Having a great friend and/or confidant at work is a leading indicator of employee engagement.
They have choices, and as soon as they choose you, someone else is recruiting them.
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5 Sales Manager Tips for Onboarding New BDRs
Great news. You’ve got proof of concept, found your ICP, and gotten some funding. Now it’s time to build out your BDR team.
Bad news. Once you win the war for talent, the real work of sales training begins. Since most SaaS startups aren’t hiring classes of 15 reps and a trainer, you get the task of onboarding one or two at a time. And then again. And again. And again.
Here are some sales manager tips to save your sanity when onboarding new BDRs:
- Start a Google Doc now with everything they’ll need to know. Brainstorm in the following categories:
- Industry acumen
- Product knowledge – feature, function, benefit
- Customer knowledge
- Ideal customer situations
- Business acumen
- Competitor acumen
- System logins and skills
- Company info – who’s who, relevant background, etc.
- Company processes, procedures, etc.
- Customer FAQ
- Demos
- Testimonials and case studies
- Questions to uncover ideal customer situations and challenges
- Call recordings to hear good, bad, and ugly calls
- Phone sales skills like leaving good voicemails, intros, uncovering contacts, and delivering value props on the phone
- Wherever possible, start hyperlinking to internal and external sites, videos, and resources so reps can self-serve for the info. Why go back and re-find that email 20 times?
- Now identify what you can outsource. Trust me, if you try to hire, train, coach, and lead the team you will either explode or mess a few of these up in a serious way.
- Buy the system training if your vendor offers it or go find free forums and videos to link to.
- Sales skills are another area. Your job is to coach them, not teach them from scratch. Outsource the heavy lifting and stick to leading the team and coaching the delivery. The Sales Bar has hundreds of phone sales resources for new BDRs and Managers. They’ll also want some basic LinkedIn skills. I like Vengreso or Frontline.
- Find internal experts. Use your CEO, product geeks, and past customers and get them to do a video or recorded webinar to teach key points. Keep them short and on track with some guidelines during your request; these folks typically aren’t natural trainers! And if they do it live, get it recorded, I promise they won’t be available every time. Where you can’t record, set up a lunch or coffee chat vs. a formal presentation. Get your new rep to record it, plus their notes!
- Start a schedule and get your document in chronological order with about 6 hours of learning work/day to start. Make the schedule about 2 weeks long and ramp the training time down while call time goes up. So by the end of the second week, they may be doing 1-2 hours of training/day and 6 hours of work. Show that training doesn’t stop and they have some assignments every month! Bonus: show a path to the next level in their career, even if it’s just a footnote. In addition to the learning, your schedule should include:
- Call shadowing with you or other reps. Bonus: have them score it using your coaching form. Side note: get a coaching form
- Calls to past customers to hear their stories and happy outcomes
- Research on their own – e.g. top features of competitors
- Outbound calling – even if it’s just to capture contacts, qualify accounts, data cleanse, etc.
- LOTS of time with you where they bring their questions, you talk shop, build a relationship, and make your newbie feel important
- Hook them up with a buddy/mentor. Reps who build strong friendships at work are happier and stay longer according to Gallup. With the average lifespan of a BDR under 18 months, it’s worth the effort. Pay for their first lunch and ask them to get together weekly for the rep’s first month. If it doesn’t stick after that, you’ve at least planted some seeds. Bonus: they’ll come to you less often for their questions when they have a buddy.
This approach will help your reps be more independent while saving you at least twenty hours per rep. Each hire can help make the document better and old hires can support the new.
Make updating the document and improving it part of their work assignment so it stays current and off your to-do list.
May this also help you resist the temptation to hand your new rep a script and wish them good luck on the phone. Millennials are searching for career development and time with their boss at work, and they make their employment decisions based on this. Spend a few bucks, give them some structure, buy them some training, and you’ll see the payoff in their faster success and tenure!
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How to Hire a Great Sales Manager
Hiring Sales Managers vs. Promoting Reps to Management
Raise your hand if you’ve promoted the wrong rep to sales manager before. Yeah, no sales leader in the world can keep both (or either of?) their hands down. And it’s so painful, right? Because they were SO GOOD at the job and so ambitious and all over you about it. Honestly, you kind of HAD to right? For risk of losing them? And how’d it end up?
I really hope you didn’t lose your top rep AND a manager within a year. But that’s how the story usually goes when I’m commiserating with my fellow sales leaders. It’s like the million-dollar elephant in the room…the right of passage every great leader endures.
So you’re in the club (welcome, leave your t-shirt size in the comments). Now, how on Earth do we stop making that mistake? I believe the key is to understand why your top reps are so darn good. Because it’s the same reason they’re terrible managers.
Top reps are in the winning business.
Doesn’t matter what industry. They’re in the “try harder” business. The “don’t give up until you get the “W” business.” They get up faster, they get up better. They make ten more calls. They do NOT take a no for an answer or a loss lying down. You might not let them date your daughter, but you want 10 more on your team.
Never put this guy (or gal) in charge.
Because management isn’t the winning business. Management is the people’s business. I love how Jack Welch said it:
“Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself.
When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.”
— Jack Welch
If we can agree that the top reps are hard-wired for competitiveness and selfishness, and KILLING your number, then we can agree we need to go in a different direction for a top manager.
Hint: have this conversation immediately when these bulldogs ask about management because they will. They’re ambitious and they want more money and prestige like always. Try something like, “Why on EARTH would you want that crap job? I hire those guys to tend to my real superstars – you. The money is worse, the hours are longer, and you’ll always have to play by the rules.” That should hold them off for a while. If that doesn’t work, put them in charge of mentoring the newbies for a year or two and see if they get sick of it.
Now, how do you find and hire the REAL management superstars? Here are my Factor 8 tips for hiring sales managers. Hope you’ll share yours as well!
- They’re a “B” level rep. These folks hit quota consistently but seldom outperform. If you had to guess, they have the effort and attitude and pretty good skills, they just lack the killer instinct to be an “A” level rep.
- They love to teach or mentor the newbies. Not sure if they’re a great mentor? Assign someone to them and see how they like it.
- They speak in KPIs. This means they know what really contributes to and indicates a win outside of dials. Try asking, “What trends have you found in your business?”
- They’ve got a process. Whether it’s how they attack leads, own their day, manage an account, or whatever. Try asking “How do you attack your account book/territory?”
These last two questions can help indicate a more strategic viewpoint. We’re looking for someone who sees the SCIENCE of sales vs. the ART. The science can be taught, but the art can not (your superstar reps were born to sell. It’s an art. They’re not really sure how they even do it, but it probably doesn’t include following the rules).
- They prioritize well. Front-line management is nothing if not chaotic. Many fail their first year just under the weight of the constant barrage of questions and requests. Someone who can prioritize time and tasks has a much better survival rate. Try asking,
“What do you do first each day and why?” - They’re a tremendous listener. If 50% of us quit because of our boss (it’s a thing, Google it, Gallup cited it), then we want someone who can connect well with others. Listening is a critical engagement skill and one that’s REALLY hard to teach and change. If they have this naturally they’re ahead of the pack. At the end of the interview, give them a rating here – subtract a point every time they interrupt, break eye contact, or were clearly just waiting for their turn to talk.
- They play well with others. You don’t need all your other departments logging complaints about the bulldog manager who’s hounding the credit department. Look for evidence of sharing, learning, teaching, and relationship-building outside an immediate team member. Try asking, “Tell me 10 people you’ve met and like outside of your team.”
- They want to make things better. I ask every new manager I teach why they decided to get into management. The bad ones want the title or money, the good ones want to help others win, and the great ones see something and want to make it better. Try asking, “Tell me about your ideas for ______.”
I look forward to updating this blog annually with the ideas you share with me. Like a grocery bag “Take a bag and leave a bag” station in the park, together we will stop hiring bad managers!
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Ultimate Sales Promotion Workshop: How to Get Promoted in Any Role [Webinar Recording]
Ultimate Sales Promotion Workshop: How to Get Promoted in Any Role
[Video Recording]